


Furiosa and Her Citadel

by Deastar



Series: WIP Amnesty [15]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, WIP Amnesty, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 11:57:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13740387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deastar/pseuds/Deastar
Summary: And then Furiosa has a Citadel. Not just a Citadel, but all the people inside it - the Wretched, the War Boys, the Milk Mothers, the Wives, the two remaining Vuvalini… and Immortan Joe's men. That last group are first in her thoughts. The threat there is most obvious.





	Furiosa and Her Citadel

**Author's Note:**

> WIP Amnesty: I'm getting all these never-to-be-finished fic bits off of my hard drive! Nothing that I post as part of this series is ever going to be finished, sorry, and many of these pieces are just one little scene - I'm just aiming to get some closure here so I can focus on the things I actually do have some hope of finishing.
> 
> I started this and was pretty happy with the worldbuilding, but eventually realized that _all_ I had was the worldbuilding - I didn't have a plot and didn't feel particularly inspired to come up with one. I was just really interested in thinking about what would happen, logistically, after the movie! But I don't need to write a fic to do that.

And then Furiosa has a Citadel.

Not just a Citadel, but all the people inside it – the Wretched, the War Boys, the Milk Mothers, the Wives, the two remaining Vuvalini… and Immortan Joe’s men. That last group are first in her thoughts. The threat there is most obvious.

The solution might also seem obvious: kill them all. But Furiosa remembers the agreement she made with the Splendid Angharad— _no unnecessary killing_ —and even though that agreement died with Angharad, Furiosa still feels bound by the spirit of it. And she cannot convince herself that a wholesale slaughter _is_ necessary. All these men appeared unshakably loyal to Joe before now, but… so did Furiosa, before she took off with the Wives. How many others might there be like her, putting on a show of loyalty only for protection, biding their time?

Furiosa is good at battle tactics, but this problem requires a mind less straightforward than hers. She brings the problem to the Dag, who shakes her head and says, “No. For this, you need Toast.”

She turns out, as usual, to be right.

Toast listens, nods, and says, “I’ll handle it.”

Over the next few days, every one of Immortan Joe’s lieutenants finds himself, by happenstance, alone in a room with Toast at her most waifish and helpless. A handful leave the room alive, having demonstrated at least a baseline trustworthiness. The others become fertilizer for the Dag’s gardens.

“Easy,” Toast says with satisfaction as the body of one of Joe’s personal guards is dragged down the stone hallway toward the farms.

There is one of Joe’s men who never finds himself alone with Toast, because they simply can’t kill him. He’s the only person who knows how the water pumps work – or at least, the only person who knows the system well enough to fix it if it breaks. Toast has a solution to this, too.

“He’s not bad-looking,” Cheedo says, looking on the bright side.

“ _No_ ,” Furiosa says fiercely. “That time is over, women are not _used_ here anymore—”

“It’s not like before,” Cheedo interrupts – she narrows her eyes at Furiosa and moves closer to Toast, maybe unconsciously. “I get a choice, now. I was _asked_. And I said yes. Everyone has to use their talents, now, for us to survive. This is mine.”

“It won’t be forever, either,” Toast says. “Just until you learn how the pumps work.”

“And then what?” asks Furiosa.

Cheedo shrugs. “And then if he’s like Joe, Toast can kill him, and if he’s like Max, then he can stay.”

_Max_. He left, of course. And Furiosa let him. He’d done enough for them, and he didn’t strike her as the kind of person who would have patience for all the slow work to follow, and definitely not for this plotting shit. Hell, _Furiosa_ doesn’t have patience for this plotting shit, but everyone is treating her like she’s in charge, so she has to at least know enough about the plotting to be able to point Toast in the right direction.

She did that, she thinks. Toast seems to have the problem of Immortan Joe’s men well under control. So now Furiosa can think about other things.

She seeks out Capable next. “What should I do with the War Boys?” she asks.

Capable doesn’t look surprised. She was expecting the question. “They’re dying,” she says softly. “And they can only be kept alive by using other people as blood bags – as _things_. And people aren’t things.”

“So I should let them die.” That’s the conclusion that Furiosa came to on her own, but she needed to run it by somebody, and anyone else would have said yes easily, lightly. Capable nods, but her eyes are red and wet.

“It’s the only way that makes sense,” she whispers. “Give them a purpose, give them joy, for what’s left of their lives, and then let them go.”

Furiosa bows her head. The War Boys were _her_ boys, for years. They’re all crazy as one-wheeled bikes, but it wasn’t their fault – Immortan Joe had warped them, as he warped everyone.

She looks up, and Capable meets her gaze. Furiosa asks, “Will you do it? Will you be their Queen until their deaths?” If the War Boys need someone to worship, Furiosa can at least give them a kinder god – one worthy of their devotion.

Something dark and old rises up in Capable’s eyes. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. I’ll do it.”

The Milk Mothers throw their support behind Furiosa immediately, largely through the proxy of Shell, who seems to be their unofficial leader. Once she has the time, Furiosa asks Shell, “What do you want? All of you? Do you even want to stay?”

Shell raises an eyebrow. “If there was anywhere to go, you’d be there right now.”

Furiosa can’t argue with that.

“We want to do things,” Shell says, sure as rock. “We want to _move_.”

Finally, a problem that the Dag can solve.

“Yes, send me the Mothers,” the Dag says, looking harried. There’s dirt all over her hands and up her forearms. Against the green of the plants surrounding her, she almost glows. “And as many other trustworthy hands as you can spare. The farms are running at less than half their capacity – Joe was always too suspicious of theft to give them as many hands as they really need.”

“Less than half capacity,” Furiosa repeats, stunned. “How do you know that?”

The Dag rolls her eyes. “I listen. I look. I understand. Now go make speeches or something. And don’t give me War Boys for the farms – they’re Capable’s, now.”

Furiosa does not want to make speeches. She has two healing holes in her torso, damage to her internal organs, and an exhaustion so deep that even the green of the gardens seems grey. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was supposed to be taking the Wives to something already built, a working machine into which they could slot themselves as the gears turned. Instead, Furiosa has to build something from scratch—a _world_ from scratch. Maybe worse than from scratch: she has to build on rotten foundations of hatred and death-love, or else rip those foundations out before she can even start to build.

“How do I do it?” she asks Vasya and Pree, the last of the Vuvalini. They’re all sharing a room, looking up at the stone ceiling in the dark, not sleeping. Furiosa’s wounds hurt to the point of nausea. “How do I make a whole world where people are safe, and are… _people_ , instead of things? How did _you_ do it?”

**Author's Note:**

> All comments are loved!


End file.
